


yellow tulips and how to use herbicide

by spookysp_ace (summermoonsdawn)



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Bittersweet Ending, Breakup, Flower Language, Hurt No Comfort, I'm so sorry, M/M, Non-Linear Narrative, Post-Break Up, kinda??, local poet is poetic, mentioned iwaidai, no comfort for kurodai, possible kurosemi, sorry i'm not really sure what else to tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-26
Updated: 2020-05-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:21:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24384229
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/summermoonsdawn/pseuds/spookysp_ace
Summary: Kuroo grew up knowing not all soulmates worked out. They were not all perfect. The universe did not dean a pair—a thrice, or more—as being touched by the heavens. There wasn’t a red string of fate. There wasn’t an instruction manual. There was only the flower stamp on most people’s bodies that acted as an intrusion on the way he would live life otherwise.
Relationships: Kuroo Tetsurou/Sawamura Daichi
Comments: 6
Kudos: 26





	yellow tulips and how to use herbicide

**Author's Note:**

> i am so fucking sorry....
> 
> if you want kurodai fluff mayhaps go and read some of my other fics.....
> 
> if you are here for hurt though, please listen to:
> 
> [hurts like hell](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYlc09NlWMM)
> 
> AND
> 
> [mean it](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MT6oSSYds4)
> 
> for maximum hurt
> 
> also: flower meanings in end notes.

**⚘**

**2 years before**

**⚘**

Kuroo’s breath had caught in the middle of his throat the first time he’d laid eyes on Sawamura Daichi. He had been rushing from his microbiology class–and it was honestly killing him to get up at the crack of dawn for this class–and he was at the fastest he could move at that time in the morning, taking the stairs of the building two at a time, before almost faceplanting with the door–

A door that was truly, unfortunately, not a door.

But a person.

“I’m so sorry–” the voice rushed, edged with morning slumber still. Deep, mellow, concerned and–

_Big, brown, beautiful–_

Eyes.

They blinked up at him, then blinked at Kuroo’s blank neck–where in his rush he’d forgotten to grab his scarf on his way out the door. Where his tulips bloomed bright against his skin, clear in the winter’s paleness around them.

“You?” The other asked in a faint whisper, carrying only in the small liminal space they’ve created together.

Amidst Kuroo’s own apology, his eyes crept to the edge of the other man’s sweater and it’s tall neck, fabric not tall enough to cover _tulips–_

_Tulips and sweet peas, and–_

And if they were in the middle of summer, with shirt necks’ dipped deep below their collar bones, Kuroo was positive as the sun rising that there would have been a single camellia.

“You–” Kuroo answers, mirroring the other’s confused, albeit startled, face.

But the brown eyes sparkled, shined, glowed all at once–bright, _bright,_ and Kuroo was _gone._

The man, his soulmate, spoke after a huff of breath, “Someone should have told me my soulmate was going to be this handsome.”

Kuroo’s cheeks brightened and he could only hope to blame it on the cold.

  
  


**⚘**

**sometime before**

**⚘**

  
  


They say everyone has a soulmate. It’s written in the books, it’s talked about on the news. It is the driving force of the media. Dating websites are set to help each person find the person or persons with a matching mark. Classes, courses, and majors focused on the nature and psychology behind soulmates and what they mean for the future of people and what human existence is _behind_ the soulmate.

It’s what connected the universe and it’s little worker ants called _humans._

Kuroo grew up knowing not all soulmates worked out. They were not all perfect. The universe did not dean a pair—a thrice, or more—as being touched by the heavens. There wasn’t a red string of fate. There wasn’t an instruction manual. There was only the flower stamp on most people’s bodies that acted as an intrusion on the way he would live life otherwise.

His parents were the statute of that example. They were the absolute standard of “soulmates gone wrong” and stubbornness pushed to make everyone, even their kid, watch their suffering.

They spent a majority of their time away from home, at their separate jobs, at a distance from one another—at a distance from Kuroo. 

Kuroo grew up staring at the red spider lily rooted in his parents' inner elbow, growing and blooming at the wrist; mirroring one another, and each other.

He grew up, poking and prodding the yellow tulips winding up his collar bone. He would stare at the small sweet peas stretching across the left side of his neck, visible for most everyone. Then, a single, large and golden camellia seated amongst the others.

Ultimately, he would look away.

But–

He grew up. He grew up, and he met Sawamura Daichi.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


❁

**1 year after**

❁

Daichi had been a romantic. He was an idealist who wanted things to work out.

He fought for the things he wanted to work out.

  
  
  
  
  
  


❁

**3 years after**

❁

Daichi wore a suit with pride. He adorned dark greens like he should have been born in a forest amongst moss and leaves, dripping the cool weather of the mountains and the stillness that haunted a forest.

None of those thoughts–Daichi being beautiful, and kindness in his smile, kind in the way he moved and nodded at Kuroo as he walked past–none of that changed in the fall out. In the build up. In the _we're still friends._

_I still love you._

_I can still hear the door shutting between us._

_I still touch the tulips on my skin–_

_I can still feel you touching the tulips on my skin._

Those thoughts had changed.

They’d changed and evolved, eroded, closed. They’d fallen and crumbled.

Those thoughts created the smile he wore on his face as he watched Daichi and his new husband walk into the reception hall. The other man and he wore matching suits say for the different type ties–a regimental tie in lush olive for Daichi, and a bow tie of the same color for the other.

The forest shades matched well with the yellows of tulips under the warm glow in the room.

Kuroo had met Iwaizumi before. He knew he was rough around the edges, but kind at the very center of it. Almost like a drumstick of ice-cream–past the shell and the nuts, past the bone-chilling cold of the vanilla ice-cream there was the satisfying chocolate at the bottom.

It was no wonder Daichi fell for him.

Some part of Kuroo was still bitter that he didn’t fight for them, but the ache he felt looking at Daichi and the other man had been there, in his heart, in his soul, for far longer. This was an ache he didn’t think would ever leave.

He said some quick goodbyes, wished the happy couple a happy and long future. He refused to catch Daichi’s eyes as he left the hall. Instead, he slipped into the night, letting the cool air wrap around him in relief.

The ache still remained, but a heaviness had left his shoulders.

He wandered the streets, for who knows how long, before he eventually collapsed into the seat of a bar he’d never once inhabited.

The strums of a guitar tumbled through his eardrums as he ordered a cold glass of whatever the bartender suggested.

  
  
  
  
  


❁

**1 year after**

❁

After everything, Daichi knew when to let go.

  
  
  
  
  


**❀**

**2 months before**

**❀**

  
  


He pulled on Daichi’s dark blue hoodie.

A chuckle pulled his eyes up, where Daichi was smiling at him from their kitchen.

“You might as well keep that, now,” the shorter man said.

Kuroo sauntered into the kitchen, looming over Daichi’s smiling face. “It’s a little too short to call my own.”

The shorter man pushed at his shoulder, light but strong and comforting in its weight where it stayed pressed against him. _This is happiness,_ Kuroo thought, looking down at the other. _This is what the world means when they talk about soulmates._

Kuroo let himself have that moment. He leaned, hunched, and pressed his face into the nape of Daichi’s neck. He nuzzled his nose into the flowers blooming there on tan skin. With a big breath, the teakwood of Daichi’s soap soaked into Kuroo’s senses. The sunshine bent flowers appeared to emit the scent from their buds. They leaked pure and clean.

They continued to emit their scent. And Kuroo acted as a bee wanting their pollen.

Daichi’s arms laced around Kuroo’s waist.

For several moments–seconds, minutes, hours and eons–they stayed there holding one another.

Kuroo had never been more at peace.

  
  
  
  
  
  


**❀**

**3 minutes before**

**❀**

Loving Daichi hurt. It was like facing all of his uncertainties and having them laid before—like an imaginary hand laid out the cards of his existence on the table of life and said _something is not right._

“I can’t do this,” Kuroo whispered in the apartment.

Loving Daichi was like walking up the steps to their shared university department building, two steps at a time, and coming up short of breath at the top. it was heavy, but it was easy. it was taking that breath after running, but realizing his muscles were sore and aching from over exertion.

“Do what?” Daichi asked, looking up from where he was chopping some carrots at the kitchen counter. Their kitchen counter. Worry etched the frown between his brows.

Loving Daichi was the winding of flowers up a fence, only to twine around a bout of poison ivy—with a spray of herbicide, they would both wither and sink to be consumed again by the dirt of the earth.

He hates it. It stings.

“Us. This. Soulmates,” Kuroo says. The words he should have said when they first met, before he dragged Daichi into his soul-consuming confusion. He turns to face the living room. 

It stings like the door of their apartment slamming shut. All of Daichi’s calm fury leaving with it. Closing the words between the space they created.

_If you didn’t care,_ Daichi whispered, begged like a starving man, _then why did you let me?_

Kuroo clenched his hips, where they sat beneath his hands. He stared at the floor, at his shadow being cast by the kitchen lights in front of him.

He reached, to his neck, under his pulse where the yellow tulips sat.

For the first time in years he felt suffocated by their embrace.

He thinks of his parents. How they would sleep in the same bed, but eat dinner separately—in the living room and in the dining room. He thinks of the red spider lilies matching the inside of their arm, and how it wasn’t a sign of fate but the signing of a death sentence and they were its victims of the sharp edged guillotine.

He knows it’s hard to dismantle what is instilled into a young mind, the absolute foundation of existence to a young youth—and he wishes for a second he would have never tried to break what his parents had built in him unconsciously.

That soulmates don’t work out.

  
  
  


**❁**

**1** **day after**

**❁**

He woke up the next day, cold. There was a space left in their bed–

_His bed?_

There were six missed calls on his phone already. Three from Bokuto, two from Akaashi, the last one from Daichi.

“ _Kuroo_ !” Bouto’s voice came through the first voicemail. “ _Hey what happened? Akaashi said Daichi was headed back to Miyagi for a while?”_

“ _Kuroo-san,”_ Akaashi’s voice mellowed in the next. “ _Sawamura-san said he was leaving. He didn’t say anything else.”_

_“Are you going after him?” Akaashi asked._

_“Why’d he leave?” Bokuto asked._

There wasn’t a voicemail from Daichi.

He felt the unsaid words all the same.

_No._

_There was no going after something that was hopeless from the start._

  
  


**❁**

**1** **day after**

**❁**

  
  


9:31AM Tetsu <3

you’re gone?

**received**

  
  


There wasn't a reply.

9:31 Kuroo Tetsurou

you’re gone?

**read**

  
That was the only reply he needed.  
  
  
  
  


❁

**sometime before**

❁

Kuroo didn’t understand the matching yellow tulips at first.

He understood, in theory, the mirror imagines of the climbing yellow flowers from the collar bones up the left side of his neck. 

He didn’t understand how suffocating they would be.

Their meaning had made no sense. They matched–didn’t they?

So why were the flowers–stamped, imprinted, etched like a chisel digging into stone–yellow tulips? 

Bright, hopeful, the exact depiction of spring. Full of endless love, and petals stroked and caressed by valley winds as they brushed grass. 

Why, then, did they mean hopeless love? One-sided love?

He’d tried, his very fucking hardest, to skip where they laid on his neck, buried amongst sweet peas and one lone sunshine glowing camellia at the base of his throat. 

It didn’t work very well.

  
  
  
  


❁

**3 years after**

❁

The chair next to him at the bar became occupied when the music on the stage cut off. He didn’t turn, he didn’t acknowledge the person until–

“Whiskey on the rocks,” they said. The tone was low, rough, used. But warm.

“Semi-Semi,” the red-headed bartender appeared. “You should have water first. That set was over an hour..”

Kuroo looked at the person sitting next to him. Their hair was falling out of a loose bun at the juncture of his spine and neck–pale but dark on the ends. Shorter than Kuroo, even as they sat in matched height chairs, but they were… Pretty.

Pretty in a way that said _I’m a rose._

_No, no,_ Kuroo thought after a moment. Roses knew they were lovely and attracted all the attention of the garden. They were also overused, easily enchanted, and borrowers of attention.

The person was a Japanese violet.

Hard eyes turned on him, a glare etched into the person’s expression like it never left.

“You know,” Kuroo started, “if you frown any harder, it’s going to stay there forever.”

The bartender started cackling behind the counter, but the person staring at him only raised their eyebrows.

“Ah, forgive Semi-Semi, he’s always like that.”

_Semi,_ Kuroo mouthed, tasting it on his tongue. 

Semi scoffed. He shook his head and some strands fell into his eyes.

  
  
  
  
  


❁

**3 years after**

❁

The musician pushed sweaty hair out of his face, before tugging part of it into what Kuroo has deemed his signature low bun on his head. Tufts of longer hair still sprouted out, clinging to the man’s neck. There, Kuroo noticed the fading colors of a soulstamp. What he hadn’t noticed on the man the day before. The fire of two small maple leaves, in their long drowned colors. They held Kuroo’s gaze for only a second.

Kuroo smiled. He tilted back, to lean heavy into the booth they’d made themselves occupants of. Behind them a band had begun to play, taking over the atmosphere that Semi had left beating on the stage.

It wouldn’t be until late that night–after the late hours spent roaming from one bar to another with Semi by his side–when he’d find freshly bloomed ume delicately weaving up the calf of his leg. Their pinks and dark centers consumed the length of his leg, rooted to the sole of his foot.

The yellow tulips and the garden they sat in, began to fade.

  
  
  
  
  
  


❁ **3 months after** ❁

A blue hoodie remained draped over the back of his couch.

Daichi hadn’t asked for it back.

**Author's Note:**

> yellow tulips: one sided love (japanese meaning) + hopeless love (western meaning)
> 
> sweet pea: goodbye (japanese)
> 
> yellow camellia: longing (japanese)
> 
> maple leaf: lovers, resurrection and cycling through the seasons (japanese) 
> 
> ume (japanese apricot): elegance, faithfulness, and pure heart (japanese) 
> 
> if any of these are wrong, don't be afraid to inform me <3
> 
> \----
> 
> well, thank you for getting through my first hurt/no comfort fic? for kurodai? i know this could have been 10x worse (and fucking longer) but i liked where it was and how it felt
> 
> maybe scream about daichi and kurodai with me?
> 
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/spacedaichi)
> 
> kudos and comments always welcome.
> 
> AND!! if you think something needs to be tagged, please let me know. <3


End file.
